He also took it much further, casting Javier Bardem as brooding hero Roland for what was planned as an action-oriented film trilogy and two more character-driven TV series. Ron Howard was the unlikely next name to pick up the mantle in 2010. Idris Elba actually gets to do something. Abrams, their commitments to Lost - another quasi-philosophical saga that struggled to untie all its knots - and unhelpful reverence to the source material put pay to any ambitions of even one adaptation, let alone a proposed seven. King’s sprawling sci-fi-fantasy-western series had been first optioned for the screen in 2007 by longtime admirers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse: showing their fanboy credentials, they paid just $19 in honor of the number that repeatedly crops up in the novels as a motif.

Considering its years stuck in development hell, the fact it even made it into cinemas at all was something of an achievement.

“A limp, barely coherent shell of a movie,” was one of the kinder reviews that greeted the 2017 release which, despite dislodging Dunkirk from the top of the box office chart, failed to recoup its $66 million budget domestically. Unfortunately, by condensing 4,250 pages of dense Stephen King mythology into just 95 muddled minutes, The Dark Tower’s team went a little too scissor-happy. In an age when every blockbuster comes with a bum-numbing runtime and a show about the making of The Godfather runs three times longer than the film itself, it’s rare to watch something which proves the concept of the editing suite hasn’t become entirely obsolete.

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